Sanitizing Mumbai?

Sanitizing Mumbai?

Sanitizing Mumbai?

Holder's Defense: 'I was played for a sucker by a lobbyist!'
From
the
NYT
today
, the lawyer for Attorney General nominee Eric Holder defends him in the Marc Rich Pardon scandal:

"There’s no question that [Marc Rich lobbyist Jack] Quinn played him and it was astute by Quinn because he did catch Eric unawares."

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Creative defense. Unfortunately, the
NYT
story makes it pretty clear that Holder knew too much about the case to have been unwillingly played. Seems more like the buddy system at work. ...[
Thx to reader J.
]
12:10 P.M.

is in the unusual position of being a cabinet member who
can't really be fired
because if the President and the Secretary of Defense were to end up at loggerheads on an issue, that could be
politically very damaging
for the president. [E.A.]

This seems astonishingly wrong. Obama can fire Gates
more
easily because Gates is a Bush holdover, no? Obama won an election by opposing Bush's policies. ... Maybe Sam Zell
had a point
about McManus. ...
2:14 A.M.

___________________________

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Monday, December 1, 2008

'You should never have made those loans groups like us pressured you to make!'
The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a "community-based organization," is
suing Wall Street ratings services
for approving bonds backed by home loans to African American and Latino home purchasers with "insufficient borrower income levels."

The firms "knew or should have known" that subprime loans disproportionately were marketed to minority consumers -- a process known as "reverse redlining" -- and that those borrowers would ultimately default and go into foreclosure at high rates, according to the coalition's complaint.

Here's a
Saturday
Belfast Telegraph
story
about Sebastian D'Souza, the photographer who took a now-famous photograph of one of the Mumbai terrorists in the process of gunning people down in a train station:

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were
the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back.
"There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back." [E.A.]

[T]he most troubling question to emerge for the Indian authorities was how, if official estimates are accurate, just 10 gunmen could have caused so much carnage and repelled Indian security forces for more than three days in three different buildings.

Part of the answer may lie in continuing signs that despite the country’s long vulnerability to terrorist attacks, Indian law enforcement remains ill-prepared. The siege exposed problems caused by inexperienced security forces and
inadequate equipment
, including a
lack of high-power rifle scopes
and other optics to help discriminate between the attackers and civilians. [E.A.]

Read the
Times
story and you'll see a numbing litany of "systemic" problems with Indian security, including "
Ill-paid city police
[who] are often armed with little more than batons," and "
little information-sharing
among law enforcement agencies" and all that inadequate equipment, including "old, bulky bulletproof jackets" and lack of thosehigh-power scopes and "
no technology at their disposal
to determine where the firepower was coming from ..." [E.A.]
It reads like the budget-increase proposal submitted by the Mumbai police bureaucracy
--The Indian Omnibus Anti-Terror Funding Act of 2009. Nowhere in the
NYT
story will you learn what American blog readers learned a day earlier when
Instapundit
(among others) linked
to the Belfast story:
Police had lots of guns, and no problem seeing who and where the terrorists were, but they wouldn't shoot at them.

I'm used to a sort of
Liebling-like
hierarchy of news sources, with twitterers and bloggers being fastest, but maybe less reliable, while the grand institutions of the MSM weigh in later with more comprehensive and accurate accounts. But that's not what is happening with this Mumbai story. The "fast" sources are telling you what happened.
The "slow" MSM sources are using their extra time to sanitize what's happened, to build euphemistic assumptions into their very reporting of the events themselves
--in this case, it just so happens,
liberal
assumptions:
1)
the idea that there is no problem that can't be solved by greater funding for government bureaucracies and more interagency taskforces**
2)
the predisposition to think widely-distributed small arms and a willingness to use them can never be a good idea and
3)
an antipathy to any suggestion that an aspect of foreign culture is inferior to nasty American culture. (Maybe we Americans are trigger happy. But do we think that a handful of terrorists could have gone on a similar rampage in New York City without quite quickly encountering a fair number of cops who would have shot back--let alone armed civilians who did the same)? ...

A friend of mine who occasionally visits the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai tells me that
earlier in November the hotel bristled with security,
including aggressively manned checkpoints--security that had been absent a few months earlier. Apparently the security was withdrawn before terrorists attacked the hotel this week. ...I don't know what to make of this, but it at least suggests that the attacks might not have been "a complete surprise," as the
headline on
Slate
's home page
(but not the
article to which it links
) claims. ... Maybe they
were
anticipated but on an earlier date? ... Maybe the extra security caused the terrorists to postpone them. ... If so, were they originally planned for before the U.S. election? ...

Update:
Hotel's owner says
"we did have such a warning, and we did have some measures," which were relaxed before the attacks. But he argues they wouldn't have made a difference because ... the gunman didn't go in the front door.

However, [Tata Group chairman Ratan] Tata said the attackers did not enter through the entrance that has a metal detector. Instead, they came in a back entrance, he said.

"They knew what they were doing, and they did not go through the front. All of our arrangements are in the front," he said.

Reminds me of the time I visited Hyannis Port when JFK was staying at the family compound there. The Secret Service was protecting it closely, except for a one-way street leaving the area, which was left unguarded--apparently on the theory that an assassin wouldn't go wrong way down a one-way street. ...
More:
kf
's friend says that during the early-November high-security period the rear doors to the hotel were locked. Not that that would necessarily have stopped the terrorists. Still, they seem to have preferred low-security to high-security. ...
1:21 A.M.